The Night Watchers
by aphrab
Summary: An old friend reflects on Dr. Mike's work for the Underground Railroad.


The Night Watchers

**The Night Watchers**

by Mary Ellen Snodgrass

Sawing and hammering were a symphony to Dr. Michaela Quinn. Days after the influenza epidemic abated, she put Sully to work ripping out rotted boards and replacing missing lengths of railing at Charlotte Cooper's old boardinghouse.

"Fresh oak planks smell clean and sanitary, not to mention they are safer for patients and visitors," she observed, mostly to herself.

"Can you hold this string steady?" he instructed as he evened the hallway floor.

"Sure," she chirped, anchoring a plumb bob line to the wall with her thumb. "I've got it."

Sully measured a second time before making a snug fit of new oak floor boards against uprights.

Michaela stood still, admiring the improvements to her first real estate.

"With a good scrub, disinfection, and whitewash, this building will serve as a fine clinic for Colorado Springs and a lifesaver for its citizens," she beamed, foreseeing the success of her venture.

"It's a good thing," Sully noted, too engrossed in smoothing out splinters for lengthy chitchat.

"You don't make much conversation. Or much mess," she added. "Just a small heap of shavings."

"No need to," Sully replied through teeth gripping his ruler. He positioned a pencil behind his ear and planed a slight warp from a fresh board. "How's that?"

"Much better," she sighed, thinking of ways to brighten the recovery rooms with quilts, rag rugs, cotton sheers, and dried flower arrangements. "I'm ready to decorate."

She angled her broom around the door jamb, loosening wood waste and nudging it toward the outer rim of the upstairs porch.

"Stage comin," Sully noted as he fitted tools back into his battered carry box.

From out front came the cry of "Whoa, Maybelle 'n Jed. Halt right yere."

As the clatter and hoorahing of the morning stage approached a stopping place before Hank's saloon, the doctor edged the sawdust pile toward the street.

The jingle of harness preceded a screech of brakes on wheels and a thump of drivers leaping from the box seat. "Ladies and gents, thirty minute stop for Colorado Springs." The team plunged frothy noses into the horse trough and snorted into algae-edged water as the driver and the shotgun rider loosened harness.

Two passengers swung down from the coach and pointed up toward bags and parcels. A mail pouch plopped to the ground in range of Horace Bing, the postmaster.

Clouds of dust floated to Michaela's second-floor post, sparking into sun-shot motes. Absorbed in her vision of a tidy medical facility, she began anew the sweeping of sawdust and the influx of dirt from hooves and wheels. She gave little thought to arrivals until the swearing of a stage passenger reached her ears.

"What the Deuce! I beg your pardon, madam! My clothes are awash in dust!" The belligerent face jerked upward as she slid the last of her sweepings under the porch rail with the tip of her broom. "Do watch where you aim your sweepings until I gather my luggage!"

Through the grainy air, Michaela blinked rapidly at the gasping stranger she was coating in trash.

Her face colored bright red at the indignity of being swept on. "Oh, dear. I apologize, sir. I didn't see you below." She leaned her broom on a porch post and looked again at a familiar profile.

"Mike? Mike Quinn? Is that you?" A smartly dressed traveler about her age beamed through a gritty cloud as he slapped his black suede hat against his right thigh and shook oak shavings and dust from his hair and shoulders. "It is you! I'll be swiggered. It's Mike Quinn. Come down here, Missy!"

"Jason Liles? Jay?" Michaela hustled toward the indoor stairs, lifting her skirt and petticoats as she stepped over Sully's hall clutter. "I don't believe it!"

Sully took in the gleeful meeting and finished realigning two hall boards for nailing.

The old friends met in a hug. Jay grabbed Michaela around the waist, swung her in a full arc, and stepped back to admire her.

"God, you're beautiful in calico and plaits." He took in her ruffled shirtwaist and tweaked the buckskin tie of a single braid that hung over her shoulder. "You look like a real pioneer."

"What a wonderful surprise, Jay. It's been ages!" She greeted him with a peck on the cheek and pulled him toward the downstairs bench. With a subtle hand, she tidied her braid and swooshed grime from her apron. "Here, sit with me. What are you doing in Colorado Springs?"

"What do you mean by that?" he bridled with a squeeze on her wrists, "I came all this way just to see you."

As Sully strode past with his carpentry tools, Michaela pulled him into the confab.

"Sully, this is Jason Dane Liles. We grew up together on Storrow Drive in Boston. I haven't seen him since he left for the war in May 1861 with the Tenth Massachusetts Volunteers."

"So good to make your acquaintance," Jay beamed in exuberant Boston style.

"Pleasure," Sully nodded a noncommittal greeting.

The two men shook hands and sized each other up—the vested, mustachioed Easterner and the buckskinned mountain man.

Sully moved on to the wagon to store his level, plane, and leftover planking.

"You live here, Mike? Right in town?" Jay inquired, gesturing at the boardinghouse.

"No. I rent Mr. Sully's old homestead outside town. I'm just getting this boardinghouse ready for a regular patient office and surgery after a week-long influenza epidemic."

"Quite a job for a lone doctor," he commented with a scan of the upper floor.

She swept her hand toward the two front doors as though welcoming Jay to a city hospital with all the trimmings. "When I needed a medical facility, Mother helped me invest in a clinic." Michaela's pride was evident, but she craved a city man's opinion. "What do you think?"

"A gift from Elizabeth?" he marveled. "It's a worthy start," he acknowledged with honest admiration for Mrs. Quinn's generosity and Michaela's daring.

"Oh, I hope so. And it was a loan from Mother, not a gift." She ended the last phrase with a wry grimace.

Jay gazed only at Michaela while taking in her incarnation as the area's only physician, a long stretch from her life as the fifth daughter of Elizabeth Weston Quinn and Dr. Josef Quinn, Boston's wealthiest and most prestigious doctor.

"How did you manage alone during an epidemic? You must've been terribly overworked."

"I had volunteers. They even took care of me when I collapsed with the fever." She gazed from Jay up at Sully in thanks for his unorthodox rescue that saved her life.

Jay's face whitened. "You came down with the influenza?" He gripped her hand.

"I'm fine, Jay." She stopped to gather her thoughts. "It would take some explaining." She continued, "I'm not usually endangered by contagion. And I'm rarely overtaxed on an ordinary day. I can manage alone unless there's a long surgery or delivery."

"Well, start filling in the gaps while we have tea and scones at a cafe," he grinned at her, looking up and down the street for a restaurant or hotel. "You, too, Sully."

With a half-smile, Sully looked up, wondering what the heck you do with a scone.

"We have no tea room, Jay," Michaela giggled. "And the closest scone is probably in Denver." With a nod toward Hank's saloon and its gawking patrons and bar girls, she added, "This isn't downtown Boston, you've noticed."

As though informing a colleague, the doctor continued her account of the epidemic. The arrival of a sick cowboy spreading chills and fever led to an alarming death rate. Her memory of running out of quinine pulled Sully into the conversation.

Michaela explained, "Sully petitioned the Cheyenne medicine man for enough purple coneflowers to save me from a high fever and to soothe a dozen others packed upstairs and down on every available cot. It was a miracle."

"Good lord, what's a coneflower?" Jay raised both eyebrows. "Sounds patently medieval."

"It's echinacea, Jay," Michaela laughed. "You can look it up in Eaton's botany manual. It's been a curative for centuries."

"You were a godsend," Jay grinned at Sully and shook his hand. "My thanks for saving Mike. And the others."

"Wasn't me. Medicine man did the dosin," Sully smiled briefly. He ducked his head and glanced away from the reunited Bostonians as though he were intruding.

"I owe Sully for a long day's carpentering. And you owe me a visit," she urged, pulling at Jay's hand. "The children are staying at Olive Davis's ranch for the weekend. You and Sully must come home and share my lone dinner with me."

"Children? You're married?" Jay tossed a suspicious glance at Sully. "You have children? That was fast."

Jay's confusion was genuine in view of the few months that Michaela had been gone from Boston and of the death of Lieutenant David Lewis, Michaela's former fiancé, at Libby prison camp in Richmond, Virginia, in the final months of the war.

"My children are another long story," she laughed, leading Jay to the wagon. "Even more complicated than the first one."

While Jay perched on the edge of Michaela's rocker in the one-room cabin, she pulled a canvas apron from a wood peg and tied the sash around her middle.

"Tell us about your journey," she prompted Jay. "What lured you away from Boston?"

Sully built up the homestead fire with split logs and kindling. He said nothing while listening to old friends sharing news, but covertly gaged Jay's character and intent.

"I had some realty papers bound for signing and notarizing at the First National Bank of Denver. I decided to bring the documents in person and see some of the country," Jay began. "The train ride west of Chicago was breathtaking. I hardly slept."

He glanced out the open door at the view from the porch of pine and spruce dusted with snow and raptors soaring above, combing the area for prey.

"It's beautiful here, Jay," she observed with a glance out the front window. "Quiet and green. And not nearly so tame and predictable as New England."

"You're right about that. I hung out the stage window most of the way from the depot watching sights I never expected, including bands of painted savages on horseback." Jay gave an involuntary shudder at the black and white symbols that marked prairie braves and their mounts.

Sully exchanged an unreadable look with Michaela, but said nothing while he hacked and splintered some wood splits with his tomahawk. He fueled the cookstove and dumped a lapful of kindling into the woodbox to make the morning stove lighting easier for Michaela.

"Thank you, Sully," she smiled into his blue eyes. "I go through so many of those in a day."

"No trouble," he nodded.

While both men watched, with a paring knife, Michaela finished peeling and coring three black Amish apples for dessert and set them into a fired clay casserole. She sprinkled each with raisins, walnuts, and cinnamon sugar and slid them into the oven along with a tin sheet of sliced peppered red potatoes and carrots for roasting. With a turning fork, she pulled thick cured ham slices from the meat keep for frying and poured three mugs of coffee.

"You cook?" Jay inquired with upturned lips. "When did Miss Michaela Quinn, the Beacon Hill debutante, acquire kitchen skills?"

Michaela gave him a mock curtsy and a just-pretend glare. "Don't smirk, Jason Liles. I've learned to do a number of things since I moved to the frontier. Except bake biscuits."

"So I see," he chortled, sipping at hot coffee.

She paused for brief consideration. "If it weren't for concerned neighbors like Sully, Charlotte Cooper, Olive Davis, and the barber, I would have been helpless."

"I'm sure a barber really came in handy," he joshed.

At the image of Jake Slicker, the sour-tempered barber, willingly assisting anyone, Sully suppressed a belly laugh. He favored Jay with a grin and shoved the sugar bowl within reach of company.

Michaela rebuked her old friend with a single glower. "Don't belittle the barber, Jay. He has experience pulling out arrows, treating frostbite, setting broken bones, and sewing up everyday lacerations from bar fights."

She stooped at the oven to check the baking temperature with the back of her hand and shoved the door shut.

A pounding on the door startled all three. Although Michaela was used to abrupt interruptions in a doctor's day, her life so far away from other homes left her feeling vulnerable after sunset.

"Would you get it, Sully?" She wiped ham fat from her hands, rubbed them quickly over yellow soap, and splashed them in water.

Sully opened the door and peered out at a young Indian rider sliding off a two-toned pony. With grunts and waves and thrusts of hands, the brave signed an emergency message and stepped back from the door with a stoic expression to await a reply.

Sully coded gestures to the brave and turned to interpret: "Dr. Mike, Cloud Dancin needs you. Quick."

"What kind of emergency, Sully?" Michaela was already shrugging into a hooded cape and fastening her medical bag. She needed more details to know what to prepare for—whooping cough, breech birth, or the inevitable gunshot wounds from army rifles.

"Walks on Cloud says Tall One hurt his leg in a rock slide at the falls. Break sounds bad." Sully settled his right hand automatically on his tomahawk as though protecting her from harm. "Want me to hitch the wagon and drive you?"

She shook her head and hustled out the door with an air of medical authority. "Would you mind staying with my guest? I'll go with Walks on Cloud and be back as soon as I can."

"Mike, I don't think—" Jay followed her outdoors, flailing his hands in the air.

Michaela was down the porch steps and hurrying to the barn for Bear before he could protest. "Sorry, Jay," she yelled over her shoulder. "See you later."

Jay gawked at Walks on Cloud with loathing. "Mike Quinn, I forbid you to leave with this—man!"

Michaela hooted at his old-fashioned display of male authority over females.

As hoofbeats echoed along the road and into the brush, Jay curled his fingers into fists and snorted outrage. "You can't let a lone woman ride into the wilderness with that—that Indian."

Sully glared at Jay but remained tight-lipped.

Goggle-eyed, Jay gulped, "What are you thinking, man? That's Mike Quinn out there. We—you—have to go bring her back!"

Sully strolled toward the dinner table and stared into Jay's eyes. "You don't know Dr. Mike. She's proud—she don't want interference." Sully said his piece and sat back in his chair.

Jay stood his ground. "I know her quite well. Better than you, I'm sure," he retorted with a blaze of indignation. "And that Indian boy. He looked shifty to me. He might, he could—. I won't have her riding with a savage in the dark!"

Sully refused to give into Jay's hysteria over Indians. "He's the son of my best friend Cloud Dancin. Dr. Mike couldn't be safer than with Walks on Cloud."

Without further explanation, Sully reheated their coffee and began scooping potatoes, carrots, spiced apples, and ham slices onto two tin plates.

"I insist," Jay repeated. "Supper can wait." He clenched his jaw, but could do little else but entreat Sully to protect Michaela.

"Rest easy. She'll be back." Sully lifted his knife and fork and cut into a potato slice. "Besides, we don't have horses. They'll be miles away by now."

Jay had little choice but to sit, eat his ham, carrots, and potatoes, and growl into his coffee cup. His eyes flicked between the road and Sully's stolid countenance.

"I won't feel comfortable about Mike until I see her return in one piece," Jay snarled.

Sully chewed companionably and sipped his coffee. When he emptied his plate, he located the cream jar and poured a dollop on his baked apple.

In the uneasy silence, Jay found himself spending the evening in a remote cabin with a rough-hewn outsider far removed from Boston society and New England manners. Though far apart in customs and lifestyle, the two found common ground in their concern for Michaela and her medical practice.

Sully filled in details of an emergency tracheotomy she performed. "It was in the middle of the night right before Christmas. She dug out a slug by lamplight to save Chief Black Kettle from chokin to death."

"Chief Black Kettle?" Jay murmured.

With a touch of pride, Sully concluded, "He gave her a Cheyenne name—Medicine Woman. That's an honor."

Jay began envisioning vast changes in his old friend. "From city girl to frontierswoman in a matter of months," he mused aloud. "She's plucky, I'll give her that."

"White man's medicine differs from Cheyenne," Sully stated, "but Cloud Dancin brings her sick people to help and shares healin plants she don't know nothin about."

At the fireside, Sully wedged an oak backlog crosswise on the andirons and poked up the embers in preparation for a long, cold January night. He leaned out the door for a last glance up the trail.

"Sky's clear and wind's down. She'll have good weather goin and comin." He shut the door and slid the bolt for the night.

In time, Jay relaxed. He smiled quietly to himself at the new Mike Quinn and began telling Sully of his long association with the prominent Boston family.

"Mike lived across the street from me since we were nine." There was a dreamy quality to his memories.

"I had a corner room upstairs and spent long hours watching her." Jay set his cup on the hearth and leaned his forehead against the mantle to stare into the blaze. "She never knew, of course. My father would have walloped me for spying."

"Was she your girl?" Sully pressed while concealing his own interest in Michaela.

"No. We were just kids on the block and school friends. I admired the Quinn family. The five sisters grew up prim and proper. They studied French, art, ballroom dance, and piano under tutors and went nowhere without a nanny." Jay look up with a quirky smile, "I had no sisters, so I learned a lot about women from the way Mike was brought up. Even with a boy's name, she was quite the lady."

"Still is," Sully observed, as though defending Dr. Mike and the West from Eastern myths of paganism and coarseness.

After a moment's revisit to the past, Jay added, "I sometimes wished I could be Mike's brother."

Jay returned to his half-eaten baked apple for another forkful. "Dr. Josef was my hero. He worked long hours at the hospital surgery. Some nights, he was so weary that a staff driver brought him home and escorted him up the steps. Mike always waited up and took his bag into the house while the butler helped him remove his cloak. In bad weather, she brushed the snow off his top hat and ushered him into the kitchen for a late supper, just the two of them."

Sully struggled to imagine a house with a nanny and a butler. He slid the bolt back, opened the door a crack, and peered up the distant slope toward night sounds. "Thought I heard somethin." Satisfied, he removed his knife belt, settled back on a chair, and stretched his moccasined feet toward the hearth.

"Things changed in 1850." Jay cast a troubled gaze at the flames and turned his thoughts inward to memories of the Underground Railroad. "After Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, Dr. Josef barely got a night to himself."

"Why's that?" Sully leaned into the conversation to glean a new vision of Michaela.

"For years, he belonged to a group of professional men—Henry Bowditch, Richard Henry Dana, Samuel Gridley Howe, Wendell Addison Phillips, Congressman Charles Sumner—all abolitionists who financed runaway slave concealment and relays. Most of the men were too prominent to receive a stream of ragged blacks into their mansions in the Beacon Hill section. It was safer to pay into the system and let others do the rescuing and transporting to Ontario." Jay paused a moment, then added, "But doctoring required an expert."

Jay leaned back under Sully's unshifting gaze. Without fear of giving away pre-war secrets, Jay continued his narrative.

"Dr. Josef had a buff jacket, slouch hat, walking stick, and pheasant hunter's bag he hung by the kitchen door. When messenger boys brought folded notes calling for a doctor, summer or winter, he would slip on his disguise and ease out the kitchen garden to a path across the back of the lot." Jay relived snowy nights when he peered from his bedroom window into the bitter wind. "I don't know how far he walked—maybe as far as the boat docks on the banks of the Charles River. Maybe farther. Sometimes he didn't return for hours."

"Did you wait up all that time?" Sully was thoroughly engrossed in the night watcher's story.

"Not just me. Michaela's lamp stayed lit until whatever hour, even sunup."

"That's not surprisin," Sully made a mental connection. "I think she was always a daddy's girl."

"She loved him a lot and sometimes crept through the shadows to the gate to see him off safely, but it wasn't just that," Jay pondered with a frown. "It was the challenge of helping people in trouble, even the ones running from posses and slave kidnappers. Under the stricter federal law against abetting slave running, she and her father risked a heavy fine and prison, even hanging."

"She hasn't changed," Sully added with a flicker of a smile. He shifted in his seat, pulled a whetstone from his pocket, and honed a knick from his knife blade.

Jay looked askance at the wicked edge, but continued. "When Mike was about 17, she began slipping out the back gate and accompanying Dr. Josef to Underground Railroad depots. She had her own apprentice's pinafore and cape and a shoulder bag of fruit, leftover dinner rolls, whatever Martha could retrieve from the leftovers."

"Who's Martha?" Sully had heard the other family names, but not Martha.

"Her chaperone," Jay explained with an affectionate recall. "A gentler soul you wouldn't find anywhere, but she'd have given her life protecting Mike."

The men flinched when a backlog settled into the embers with an upsweep of sparks. Sully removed the coffee pot from the burner and checked the damper for the night before listening once more at the door for sounds of Bear galloping up the trail.

"I think you're goin to be spendin the night here." Sully gestured, "You can stretch out on the bed."

"And where will you sleep, sir?" Jay inquired with a touch of city manners.

"I'm not used to a bed." Sully continued smoothing the knife blade with deft strokes of his whetstone.

"I don't follow your meaning," Jay interposed, his eyes wide with curiosity.

"I sleep Cheyenne style." Sully stressed the word "Cheyenne," but he gave no more explanation of the native customs that had become his own. He stowed his knife in its sheath, settled his poncho around him, and hunched against the rock hearth.

"Well, good night, then," Jay murmured, pulling his overcoat over him and nestling into Mike's pillow.

The peaceful watch approached an end with a distant lightening of the sky. Hoofbeats roused Sully quickly to the door. He jerked the bolt along its frame, slid onto the porch, and crouched silently in the shadows. When Michaela rode into sight, her Indian escort gave Sully a curt nod and cantered west into the bracken.

Sully reached for the reins before she halted Bear at the barn. "You okay, Dr. Mike?"

Michaela said nothing, but her mournful expression didn't bode well. He helped her down and guided her to the door.

"You look awful wobbly." He gripped her bag and steadied her with his free hand.

"Oh, Sully, Cloud Dancing wouldn't let me do my job," she wept. "He wouldn't let me operate." With a desultory gaze at Jay's sleeping form, she shucked her cloak, moved toward the mantle, and chafed chill hands in heat from the embers.

Sully pondered the contretemps with Cloud Dancing while poking up the fire and adding a few wood splits to the base.

"What happened to Tall One?" He frowned in concern for his old hunting mate.

"He's gone—dead not a half hour ago." Michaela hugged her arms close to her chest and pursed her lips. "There's much sadness among his family and the tribe."

Sully looked pained at the death. He bent his head and closed his eyes briefly to honor Tall One's passing. To the Great Spirit, he voiced a reverent "Ha-ho" for all life, especially that of a friend.

"I laid out my bandages and injected morphine. He was in agony. When I reached for scalpels and bone saw, Cloud Dancing stopped me." Her eyes snapped with anger.

Sully guided Michaela to the rocker and spread a lap robe over her quivery knees.

"Tell me," he urged.

Her objectivity in check, Michaela stated a medical opinion: "Tall One fell into the path of a landslide. A boulder crushed his left thigh and knee. He was in critical condition when I examined him." She enumerated life-threatening detail. "The flesh was lacerated to the knee and thigh. Bone fragments protruded from the wounds in several sites. There was no realigning them. He had lost too much time, too much blood on the transfer from the falls. I needed to amputate."

"I see," Sully remarked with a better understanding of her frustration with Cloud Dancing.

"See what?" Michaela glared at Sully as though defying the medicine man all over again and rebuking the wisdom of the Great Spirit. "He couldn't live with crushed bones. Perhaps with round-the-clock medical care at a city hospital, but not in a small mountain village."

"The Cheyenne value a whole body. If you cut off his leg, Tall One couldn't walk to the camp in the stars like that." Sully's impassive expression mirrored the medicine man's stolid refusal of amputation to save a life.

"Sully, that's nonsense," Michaela huffed. "Plenty of men survived the war without arms and legs. Nobody worries that they won't go to heaven without all their parts."

"I know, Dr. Mike." He squatted by the fire and gazed into her eyes. "But Indians have their ways."

"You're defending Cloud Dancing? You're defending my neglect of Tall One?" Her look challenged anyone refusing modern medicine, especially a suffering accident victim she might have saved. "That's preposterous!" Tears of frustration coursed her cheeks.

"I don't interfere. The Cheyenne've lived hunnerds of years in their own way." He softened his voice. "I respect it."

Sully heated the leftover coffee and poured a half cup over two spoonfuls of sugar. Michaela stirred and sipped at the sweet liquid to regain her strength.

The two continued debating Tall One's death.

"He could still be alive," she fumed. "I got there in time."

"Don't blame yourself. Tall One wouldn't've wanted t' be a one-legged Indian."

Sully's confidence in Cheyenne philosophy began to sink in, but didn't dissuade Michaela from the injunctions of the Hippocratic Oath, her ethical beacon.

Their word battle roused Jay, who sat up under his greatcoat and greeted Mike's safe arrival from the abrupt night call.

"Mike! I was worried about you." He concealed embarrassment that he slept rather than keep watch.

"I'm often out late," she began.

Jay raked at his hair with splayed fingers and joined the two at the hearth. "How well I remember," he interrupted, gripping her fingers with both hands. "But with Dr. Josef and not in an Indian village. And not traveling alone with a native on horseback in the dark."

She bridled at his version of the mission. "I was conferring with the medicine man about a seriously injured patient." She filled in the details of Tall One's injury and death from shock and blood loss.

"Good lord! How primitive." Jay raised his brows and stared as though seeing a new side of his old friend. The Easterner's inexperience with Indian ways made the situation seem more grotesque.

"Cloud Dancin is a fine doctor," Sully interjected in defense of his best friend.

Jay cast an incredulous look at Sully. "Doctor? An Indian? That's ridiculous. He probably can't even read and write."

Sully glowered at the insult.

"Oh, Jay, I'm too tired to explain," Michaela protested, smoothing tears from her cheek.

"You need a good sleep, Dr. Mike," Sully insisted, ignoring Jay's faulty views on the Cheyenne. He helped her to bed and slid a coverlet and wool blanket over her.

Michaela was gone in minutes without thought to the unladylike situation—a single woman sleeping in the presence of two men, neither one a relative.

Sully turned to Jay. "Want some coffee? Got a couple hours before the stage leaves."

Jay looked back on the woman he had watched over from girlhood. "She came of age as a benevolent healer, beginning with night surgeries on former slaves huddled in hideaways and tunnels." He puzzled over despair in Michaela, his typically optimistic friend. "What happened? Did her treatment fail?"

"Fraid so," Sully replied. "She'll tell more when she rests up." As an afterthought, he added, "Sometimes practicin medicine Indian style is a shock."

The two carried their coffee cups to the front railing and looked into the sunrise.

Jay began, "She amazes me, traipsing off into the night into God knows what kind of situation. Nothing matters so long as she can have a hand in helping people. She learned that from Dr. Josef." With a swift glance at Sully, he added, "Sounds like you've done your share of waiting up for Mike just like me."

"I stay close. It's not easy for a city woman to survive alone in the wilderness while raisin three orphans."

Jay lit a cheroot and drew a contented breath. "I like you, Mr. Sully," he confided. "Maybe I was wrong judging the Cheyenne."

"Maybe you were." Sully's answer revealed no grudge, only awareness that Easterners like Dr. Mike and Jay take time to absorb the differences in life on the frontier.

Jay shrugged in apology. "I think I can hand over my night watch now. You seem to be the man for the job."


End file.
